Brit Director Sean McAllister's 'The Reluctant Revolutionary' To Open Berlin's Panorama Dokumente Section

LONDON – Brit director Sean McAllister’s The Reluctant Revolutionary will open this year’s Panorama Dokumente section of this year’s Berlin International Film Festival.

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The movie details the story of a Yemenite tourist guide who slowly abandons his professional distance towards the political spring in his country.

Sidebar organizers have so far programmed 19 titles into the section which also includes a quartet of titles from U.S. filmmakers.

America is repped by Call Me Kuchu directed by Malika Zouhali-Worrall and Katherine Faifax Wright, Matthew Akers’ Marina Abramovic The Artist Is Present, Jeffrey Schwarz’s Vito and Words of Witness by Mai Iskander.

In Words of Witness, a 22-year-old woman journalist questions people on the streets of Cairo about parliamentary elections and democracy.

This year’s sidebar themes span the Arab World and the Middle East, G8 and globalization and  “queer memory” in which gay cinema themes and issues are examined.

Vitobrings back to life the political days of the 1980s and recounts the time American film historian Vito Russo gave his famous lecture “The Celluloid Closet” during the Panorama in Berlin in 1983, when it was still called the Info-Schau.